Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on September 11, and in most American synagogues the seating chart was settled weeks ago. So was something else, less discussed from the bimah: the security plan — the contract guards, the camera positions, the greeter training, the question of who stands where when several hundred unfamiliar faces walk through doors that, fifty weekends a year, admit mostly familiar ones.
American synagogues are spending more on security than they ever have. The clearest single measure is the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which underwrites target-hardening for houses of worship and other at-risk nonprofits. Two decades ago the program distributed roughly $10 million a year. In 2026 it stands at $300 million. That is a thirtyfold expansion — and it still does not meet demand. In the most recent cycle for which full figures are available, fewer than half of applicants — about 43 percent — received funding at all.
The gap between the appropriation and the need is the story, because the need is no longer episodic. Congregational budgets that once treated security as a line item that spiked after an attack and decayed afterward now treat it as fixed cost, like the roof or the cantor. Larger institutions are into seven figures: gatehouses, ballistic film, camera systems with analytic software. Smaller congregations — the ones least likely to win a competitive federal grant — patch it together with volunteer greeters, local police overtime, and whatever their federation’s security desk can spare.
The training side has scaled with the money. The Secure Community Network, the Jewish community’s national security organization, has run close to a thousand in-person trainings so far in 2026, reaching roughly 25,000 people. Ahead of the holidays it moves to webinars, for a reason specific to this season: the High Holidays invert a synagogue’s ordinary security posture. The rest of the year, the person at the door recognizes nearly everyone. On Rosh Hashanah, the building is full of strangers by design — members’ relatives, twice-a-year attendees, the unaffiliated answering something they couldn’t name. The training problem isn’t teaching vigilance; it’s teaching vigilance that doesn’t curdle into a checkpoint.
Pittsburgh does not need the concept explained. This community rebuilt its idea of synagogue security in public, under the worst possible tutelage, and the campus rising at Wilkins and Shady is partly an argument about how a Jewish building holds both openness and protection at once. What has changed since 2018 is that the Pittsburgh posture — professional assessment, hardened perimeter, trained laypeople, standing relationship with law enforcement — stopped being a response and became the national baseline.
What hasn’t been settled is who pays. The federal program’s growth has been bipartisan and steady, but 43 percent coverage means the majority of applicants are financing the baseline themselves. Several national organizations are using this holiday season to press Congress on exactly that point. Their argument is uncomplicated: the cost of sitting in a pew for a few hours in September should not include a capital campaign.
The holidays will proceed the way they now do. The shofar will sound behind doors that lock, in rooms watched by cameras, among greeters who have taken the webinar. None of that is the liturgy. All of it is the condition under which the liturgy currently happens — and the condition, this year, has a budget line.